[Pipet Devel] Web interface

[Rahul Jain]

I was thinking about the Web interface we are planning to have to TULIP.

We'll need to plan out our design of the other tools very carefully so
that we don't have to create messy kludges to get this web interface to
work.

Many of the GTK widgets are difficult to incorporate into pure HTML pages.
Using JavaScript may help, but there may still be some difficulties. It
may even turn out that we'll need to create a Java interface instead.

We really ought to limit the widgets we use and the way we modify them.
- Looking at the glade widget palette, the first 3 rows shouldn't be a
  problem. Lists are fine as long as they are kept simple.
- Trees... not too good.
- Columned lists shouldn't be too bad (either a table or a bunch of lists
  next to each other w/ Javascript to keep their scrolling in sync... Is
  that possible?)
- Columned tree... ugh.
- Rulers, shouldn't really need those.
- The H and V rules aren't a problem.
- The scales and scrollbars, on the other hand present a problem w/out
  JavaScript.
- Menu bars are fine, but we may need/want to use layers to implement
  them.
- Status bar is easy, so is toolbar.
- Progress bars may need some JavaScript.
- Arrows are trivial.
- Image and pixmap should be simple (as long as my assumptions of what
  they do are right.)
- Drawing area, probably kind of tough if my assumption of what it does is
  right.
- Font selection, not needed.
- Most of the Containers can be implemented with tables and/or frames.
- For scrolled window, viewport, and handle box, I think we'll need
  layers.

Maybe we can have wrapper classes around the GTK widgets and then have
them also able to create HTML code.

What are everyone's thoughts on this? We really need to make sure our UI
possibilities are strictly specified and translatable to HTML/JavaScript.
It may be a pain to do that, I think we want to keep away from requiring
Java, which will be a real pain.

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